Actor William Shatner is hoping to save California from further
drought by proposing an enterprise of his own - importing water from the
Seattle area, where rain is plentiful.

"I want $30 billion ... to
build a pipeline like the Alaska pipeline. Say, from Seattle - a place
where there's a lot of water. There's too much water," the "Star Trek"
actor told Yahoo's David Pogue in an interview. "How bad would it be to
get a large, 4-foot pipeline, keep it aboveground - because if it leaks,
you're irrigating!"

Shatner said he plans to launch a Kickstarter
campaign to raise $30 billion to build the pipeline from water-soaked
Seattle to fill California's lakes.

Pogue expressed some
skepticism about the plan, to which Shatner responded: "They did it in
Alaska - why can't they do it along Highway 5? This whole area's about
to go under!"

Shatner said although raising $30 billion would be
challenging and may not come to fruition, the effort would raise
awareness about California's drought.

Decades ago, California
water officials talked about taking water from the Pacific Northwest but
those plans were never realized.

During earlier droughts in 1977
and 1990, Los Angeles Supervisor Kenneth Hahn proposed digging aqueducts
that would carry water to California from the Columbia River in the
Pacific Northwest and the Snake River in Idaho. But there was little
interest from those states.

"I have the distinct impression that
you are trying to steal my water," Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt said in a
letter to Hahn in 1990.

Shatner's comments come as Gov. Jerry
Brown has ordered urban communities across the state to cut water use by
25% over the next year.

The move comes as one of the most severe
droughts in modern California history persists. Irrigation deliveries
have been slashed and farmers expect to idle more than 500,000 acres of
cropland this year. Groundwater levels in some parts of the San Joaquin
Valley have sunk to record lows as growers drill more and deeper wells.
Some small communities dependent on local sources have run out of water.

Although
major reservoirs in Northern California hold more water than they did a
year ago, the Sierra Nevada snowpack that normally provides the state
with about a third of its water supply hit a record low for April 1.

Last
week, California received little precipitation with extreme to
exceptional drought covering two-thirds of the state, according Michael
Brewer, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's National Climatic Data Center.